EMC storage arrays provide state-of-the-art integration with VMware vSphere including support for:

• vStorage APIs for Array Integration
  
• vCenter Site Recovery Manager adapters
  
• PowerPath/VE multi-pathing
  
• vCenter management plug-ins
  
• VMware-aware management
  
• All storage protocols (FC, FCoE, iSCSI and NFS)

• Automated movement of data to the most efficient disk technology based on activity
  
• Reclamation of wasted capacity with file-level deduplication and real-time data compression
  
• Improved storage utilisation by allocating as needed with Thin Provisioning
  
• Cost-effective scalability by adding Flash drives for more performance and rotating drives for more capacity

New technologies like enterprise Flash and high-capacity SATA drives hold the promise for more efficient storage strategies - SATA drives offer the lowest cost per GB and Flash drives offer the lowest cost per IO.

Flexible connectivity options including GbE and Fibre Channel, enable the best balance of performance and TCO. Next-generation 10GbE supports LAN and storage traffic on a single cable dramatically reducing the complexity of the physical network.

Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) can redistribute hot, warm, and cold workloads onto Flash, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives at the sub-LUN level. FAST is like having a SAN expert automatically rebalancing workloads when it makes most sense.

FAST Cache provides an immediate performance benefit by holding a large percentage of the most frequently used data in high-performance Flash drives, thus reducing the required IO from rotating drives.

Migrate your file shares directly to the storage platform and benefit from:

• Higher performance and availability
  
• Improved security and data protection
  
• Improved efficiency through deduplication
  
• Reduced daily backups using file tiering

By moving historic typically inactive files to a secondary tier storage costs and daily backups can be reduced.

Private and public cloud storage does not need to be backed-up and therefore is an ideal tier for historic data.

The introduction of Flash drives for placement of the replica virtual machine images allows for a significant reduction in the number of drives needed to service the IOs.

The support for vStorage APIs for Array Integration dramatically improves the performance by off-loading tasks to the array and eliminating VMFS locking contention.

Storage performance is often the number one bottleneck in virtualised environments therefore the storage array needs to be accurately sized for performance as well as capacity.

SNS have the tools and experience to help design an optimal configuration using a combination of Flash and rotating drives.